Travesti Baby

Before the baby comes to life as an idea—let alone as a breathing body following the breaking of water—a network of demands awaits them, ready to confine, conform and confirm their being. And, as it turns out, the being, or lack thereof, of others. In many ways, by the time the baby is born, it’s too late. Their costumes have already been tailored, their role already cast. There is only room for the baby to come to be as someone else. Certainly not a certified copy of the baby of parental fantasy, or of those the baby is interpellated to exhume. But something scrapped together with the detritus of a history that precedes the baby, “at the mercy of a thread spun” decades, if not millennia, ago (Lacan, In J. Lacan, Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.), p. 434). This triggers the interweaving of the baby’s singularity with the idealized fabric that might only ever fit them as an act of passing. Can a baby who accepts the demand to mime the parental object(s) whose loss supports the baby’s very emergence, ever amount to something other than a travesti baby perennially waiting for the usufruct of seduction’s lifelong labor? Through an auto-biographical-theoretical account and drawing from literary and visual arts, this article takes stock of the magnitude of the logic of this dis-simulation and re-semblance which conditions the baby’s survival as lovable object, if not subject, on enacting the primordial other’s desire for re-placement: a baby cloaked with the absence of someone else. The travesti baby of the text, specifically forged in a Latin American context of (military) coups within coups, becomes a site for theorizing family, nation, and symbolic inheritance through a trans psychoanalytic perspective.